Publications & Testimony

Just weeks after leg­is­la­tors in Wyoming and South Dakota passed leg­is­la­tion to ban the exe­cu­tion of juve­nile offend­ers, law­mak­ers in Florida are on a sim­i­lar course that may send a bill that elim­i­nates the death penal­ty for those under the age of 18 to Governor Jeb Bush for sig­na­ture into law. Members of the Florida Senate passed the juve­nile death penal­ty ban by a vote of 26 – 12, and the House is expect­ed to take up the mea­sure lat­er this week. Florida House Speaker Johnnie…

More than two decades after Max Soffar was sen­tenced to die for a Houston-area triple mur­der, an appel­late court has ruled that his court-appoint­ed attor­ney inad­e­quate­ly rep­re­sent­ed him dur­ing his 1980 tri­al and that he deserves to be retried with­in 120 days or freed from Texas’s death row. Although no evi­dence link­ing Soffar to the crime was ever found and his accounts of the mur­ders, con­tained in what are believed to be false con­fes­sions, var­ied vast­ly from sev­er­al eye­wit­ness­es, Soffar’s…

National Law…

St. Petersburg…

“The Problem of False Confessions in a Post-DNA World,” a recent study pub­lished in the North Carolina Law Review, found that juve­nile offend­ers were involved in 33% of the cas­es where the defen­dant con­fessed to a crime that he or she did not com­mit. Ninety-two per­cent of the cas­es involved false con­fes­sions from indi­vid­u­als under the age of 40, and more than half were under the age of 25. According to the study’s authors, law pro­fes­sors Richard Leo of the University…

Decatur…

By a vote of 29 – 19, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights passed a res­o­lu­tion call­ing on all nations to declare a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions. The res­o­lu­tion cit­ed con­cerns about the fair­ness and accu­ra­cy of the death penal­ty. In order to address these prob­lems, the res­o­lu­tion calls on nations that no longer use the death penal­ty to remove it from their laws, and for coun­tries that con­tin­ue to car­ry out exe­cu­tions to lim­it the num­ber of crimes that may be pun­ished by death. The…

Lakeland…

Concorde (NH)…

Researchers at the University of Michigan iden­ti­fied 328 crim­i­nal cas­es, includ­ing 73 death penal­ty cas­es, over the last 15 years in which the defen­dant was ulti­mate­ly exon­er­at­ed. The study sug­gest­ed that many more inno­cent peo­ple are in prison today. Most of the cas­es stud­ied involved mur­der and rape, crimes that are sub­ject­ed to the most intense police inves­ti­ga­tion but that can also pro­vide defen­dants with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to prove their inno­cence based on DNA evi­dence. Of the 328 cases of…